Slack

Slack is an excellent and powerful group-messaging app with a rich collection of settings and options. It won't magically erase all the problems of email, but integrate it intelligently with other software and it becomes a key part of any team's collaboration.

Pros

Excellent private backchannel.
Great for nonessential communication and discussion.
Wonderful, rich set of tools and options.

Cons

No calendar, task-management, or other collaboration features.
Requires thoughtful use to be effective.

Bottom Line

Slack is an excellent online communication tool with a rich collection of settings and options.
It's not a soup-to-nuts collaboration tool, but there's nothing better for messaging and back-channel chat.

Jan. 2, 2017Chris Fernando

Slack makes communication among team members not only easier, but better. The trick to loving this messaging platform is knowing when and how to use it, and what to expect from it. Does it replace email? No. Does it help cut back on needless internal email? Often, yes. In Slack, teams set up spaces, called channels, to have conversations. The big difference between it and email is that in Slack, most conversations are optional, whereas with email the assumption is that participation is required of all recipients. Slack works very well as a collaboration tool in business because of its notifications, which are plentiful and customizable. It also supports audio and video calls. You'll be pleasantly surprised to peel back its layers of complexity. Here at PCMag, we use Slack, and it's our top pick for online communication and collaboration.

Plans and Pricing

Slack has a free option as well as two tiers of paid plans, called Standard and Plus. You can use Slack Free with as many people as you want, but there are limitations. You can only have audio and video calls between two people, not groups. Free accounts are restricted to 5GB of file storage for uploads across the entire team, and users can only search the most recent 10,000 messages. Free accounts are also restricted to having no more than 10 integrations with other apps. More about integrated apps in a bit.

A Standard Slack account costs $8.00 per user per month, with a small discount if paid upfront annually (it's a little more than $80 per user per year). A Standard account includes the ability to search an unlimited number of messages and have unlimited integrations. Standard accounts have a file storage limit of 10GB per person, and group calls are supported. Guests are allowed to join, which is helpful if your team works frequently with external clients or collaborators. Team administrators can mandate two-factor authentication for all users if they like, as well. The Slack Standard account comes with a few more perks, too, including advanced usage statistics and priority support.

The Slack Plus account, which costs $15 per user per month, also with a discount when paid upfront annually ($150 per user per year), includes everything mentioned so far, plus 20GB of storage per person for uploads. Plus account holders are promised 24/7 support with a 4-hour response time. They also have the ability to provision and deprovision users.

An Enterprise option has been on the horizon for more than a year as of this writing, but is not officially available yet. Very large organizations in need of a team messaging solution should contact Slack for more information.

Atlassian HipChat, another team messaging platform that also has a free and paid plan, costs significantly less than Slack for its Premium version. HipChat Premium costs $2 per user per month. It also includes group audio chat, video chat, and screen sharing. Slack doesn't have native screen sharing yet, although it is available through a third-party app integration with Room or Zoom. For HipChat's price, you get unlimited file sharing and storage, as well as unlimited message history. It's a pretty good value, comparatively.

Another messaging app for teams called Ryver only has a free version at the moment, but has announced it will offer a more premium paid service in the future. For now, its free app comes with no limitations on users, guests, teams, chats, posts, search, or uploads. It also has no ads. Ryver isn't nearly as slick and responsive as Slack or HipChat, however.

Getting Started

Make no mistake, Slack takes some learning, with an adjustment period of hours if you're lucky, or in my case, a few weeks. Part of getting started is exploring the apps (mobile, desktop, and Web), settings, and configurations, to learn what's possible. The other reason it takes time is because the team itself needs to figure out its rules of engagement. If you are joining an existing Slack team, there may already be some etiquette in place, in which case you need to take the time to learn what it is.

To log into Slack, you have to go to your team's unique URL. Then you can sign in with a username and password. Slack supports two-factor authentication, and when logging into its mobile apps, you see an option to have a key delivered to you so that you don't have to type a password.

Slack gets a lot of little things right, such as the ability to edit a message after you've posted it, and decently sized previews of pages when you add links. Screen space is adequately used. Because it's not uncommon to be invited to more than one Slack account, you can quickly switch between the accounts from the left sidebar. You can also customize each account to appear in a different color theme, which helps tremendously in keeping multiple groups straight.

First Impressions

When I first started using Slack, the app felt disorganized to me, cluttered in a way that made me worry I'd lose track of what was happening or miss important information. It also seemed very chaotic. The key to making it more useful, however, is to customize the app's alerts so that you only get notified regarding conversations that are relevant to you.

When people talk about Slack being a "pull" rather than "push" communication tool, they mean that information is freely available to you, but you have to go get it or pull it toward you. Contrast that to email, where information is pushed to you, and you are expected to consume it, even if it's not relevant. So the trick to using Slack effectively is figuring out how to make sure you're pulling the right information. You do that through the settings and options.

In addition to your setting up the right settings and options, success with Slack also depends on your team's ability to use tags, Channels, and @ signs appropriately.

Now that I've used Slack for more than two years both among friends and for work, I've become much more comfortable with it. I trust that others will use an @ symbol followed by my name or send me a direct message if they need something from me. I also set up keyword alerts and enabled a "do not disturb" setting for when I'm usually asleep in my time zone. Getting comfortable did not happen overnight. Configuration really is half the battle, though.

The other half of the battle is culture. If you use Slack in a workplace setting, company culture will drive how Slack is used, and conversely, the use of Slack will shape the corporate culture. For this reason, it's very important that people in leadership roles actively participate in Slack when it's used.

I still don't believe Slack is an effective tool on its own for managing tasks and workflow, the way Asana or Atlassian JIRA is. Nor is it appropriate for managing projects, which is better handled by a dedicated project management service such as Zoho Projects. It can be used in tandem with these other apps and services, however, and then it's really powerful. More on integrating with other apps in a bit.

Slack Apps and Beta Apps

Slack is available for a variety of devices and platforms, but it's a real-time, cloud-based tool, so you need an Internet connection to use it. There are mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. There's a Web app, as well as desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Actually, there are two versions of the desktop apps for Mac and Windows. There's a standard one that's little more than the Web app in a wrapper, and then there are beta apps of more fully developed desktop apps.

At the time of this writing, the beta desktop apps do not have any special functionality compared with what's in the standard desktop apps. They may be slightly faster, but they may also be buggier, seeing as they are still in beta. The beta apps are freely available to download and use. But they don't have anything special.

To get video calls, you need one of the desktop apps or to be running Slack in the Chrome browser. Users who join a group video call via a mobile device get audio only. The mobile app has its own uses.

As someone who works in a different time zone than my colleagues, I find the mobile app extremely beneficial. If something important requires my attention at a time when I'm unlikely to be at my workstation, I get a notification on my phone. And because of the nature of Slack as a messaging app, rather than an email app, the message is usually very short. As a result, I can quickly decide whether to reply and if so, how, without feeling like I need to open my laptop for an unexpected half hour of catching up on email.

Interface and Layout

Slack uses Channels as a way to create different spaces where people can converse. When you start a new Slack account, two Channels will already be created for you: #general and #random. Channels, which are always designated by hashtags, effectively become streams or threads; that is, themes for conversations. Channels are open for anyone in your account to join.

While it's helpful to see #general and #random as starting points, they aren't representative of how most teams could or should use Channels in a real business setting. You can rename channels at any time and archive them if you want to move all their content out of sight.

Better Channel names might be the titles of projects, clients, or departments. Often teams have Channels called #banter, #social, #news, #humor, or just plain old #watercooler. They can be whatever you want, and you can add a short description that will appear alongside it when users go looking for new Channels to join.

Naming Channels clearly and appropriately is extremely important for helping your teammates understand where to go and why. That's one reason I wish the defaults were named something a little more useful. A typical problem Slack users have is that team members create too many Channels, so it's important to think about what they should be ahead of time. It also helps to create informal rules regarding who can create new Channels. By default, it's anyone on the team.

The main Slack interface puts your Channels and a few other selections, such as private conversation and direct messages, in a left rail. The center of the screen is for displaying the stream of content related to your selection. If you click on #project-x, then the center of the screen shows the latest discussions that you and your teammates have had about Project X, all with date stamps. You can scroll through the history of the channel to read what has been said, or you can search using a search bar.

Private Channels let you have private conversations among only invited people. These threads show up alongside other Channels but they have a lock icon next to them instead of a #.

That listing of Channels on the left is more useful than it first appears. Any time there are new, unread messages, the Channel name appears in bold. The same goes for when your name is mentioned or when you receive a related direct message. A number appears alongside it to indicate how many mentions or messages you have.

Customizing Slack

As you use Slack, tutorial boxes orient you with helpful hints. You can turn them off, but I recommend leaving them enabled for at least a few days because there really is a lot more to Slack than meets the eye.

The most important way to customize Slack is to be choosey about the Channels you join, as you don't have to subscribe to every single one. That's part of the pull versus push differentiation. If you don't work on Project X, there might be little reason for you to follow the Channel created for it. However, if you are unaffiliated with Project X, but highly involved in keeping Client Y happy, you might set up an alert so that you're notified anytime someone mentions Client Y, including in the #project-x Channel. The alert takes you right to the relevant part of the conversation, so you don't end up scrolling through the everyday chatter.

Click around, too, and many more options and menus appear. Every corner seems to have something. The top-left corner lets you invite more members to your Slack team, adjust the team settings and administrator settings, switch teams, and more. A bell icon in the same general area lets you snooze notifications for a selected time period. Buttons in the top right help you filter discussions by messages you've marked with a star, recent mentions, files you've added to conversations, and all files, as well as reaching a team director and opening an activity feed.

Notifications are what eventually won me over to Slack's true utility. When the app first became popular, it was touted as a more efficient alternative to email, which isn't necessarily true. Slack itself isn't immune to lost time through frivolous conversations. But if you make use of all the notification settings, it can be a much better tool for communication.

Enabling notifications for new activity in certain Channels helps tremendously, as well as notifications for direct messages. Key word notifications are another aspect of Slack I highly encourage people to use. Imagine only seeing a new email in your inbox if it were actually relevant to you, and having the relevant part highlighted. I love Slack's notifications, and I love how many options Slack provides for audio tones for those notifications. There's even a "send test notification" link so you can see for yourself how notifications appear and sound before committing to them.

Integrations

Slack is not a one-stop workforce collaboration tool. Rather, it's meant to be cobbled together with other tools to form a Voltron of software, if you will. Integrations with other apps and services let you do that.

One example is to integrate with email. Let's say you want to send an email into Slack so that others in a particular Channel can read it. Slack lets you generate a custom email address for that purpose. Or, you can set up an integration such that things you type into Slack get sent to another app, such as Trello, JIRA, or GitHub, to name a few options.

All kinds of automations are possible using Zapier as well, which supports Slack. There's really a lot you can do so that Slack incorporates all the other tools your team already uses.

That said, if you're in the market for collaboration tools, you don't have to go the Voltron route at all. Some workplace management platforms already offer chat, video calling, task management, and everything else you could want in one place. Editors' Choice Podio is a great example. Podio is a hub where work and collaboration both happen, and it has its own app store so that you can include everything you need natively, whether it's invoicing tools or an app for meeting agendas. Podio and other workplace-collaboration platforms usually have calendars, to-do lists, reminders, and many other work tools already included.

The Best Backchannel?

Slack is a PCMag Editors' Choice for online communication because of its breadth and depth. It's a highly customizable service that plays well with others. Be warned that its price tag is significantly higher than that of its main competitor HipChat. Make sure you understand what Slack does and doesn't promise to deliver before adopting it for your team. It's an excellent place for conversations and discussion, but if you're looking to manage tasks and workflows, you need more than Slack alone.